The Events Manager, the Partida Creus Apprentice & the Basement Cellar
A Congolese-Belgian woman who left Brussels events industry for natural wine bars, apprenticed with Massimo Marchiori at Partida Creus, and built her own estate from a garage beneath her house in Bonastre — Emilie Mutombo makes precise, zero-addition wines that taste whole, self-protect against faults, and carry her brother's art on every label.
Origin — From Brussels Bars to Massimo's Cellar
Emilie Mutombo was born and raised in Brussels, the daughter of Congolese parents, and spent her twenties working in the events industry — organising, coordinating, managing. Nothing in her background suggested vines. What changed her was the wave of natural wine bars that swept through the Belgian capital in the late 2000s and early 2010s. A fascination that began with drinking grew into studying: she enrolled in oenology, then left for internships at a commercial winery in South Africa and at Domaine du Chêne Bleu in Gigondas, where she learned the conventional side of the craft.
The decisive encounter came in 2017 at the Les Anonymes natural wine fair in Angers. Emilie tasted the wines of Partida Creus, met Massimo Marchiori, and within weeks had packed her bags for Catalonia. She arrived in Bonastre that spring intending to take an administrative role; by summer she was in the vines, and by harvest Massimo had granted her and an Australian friend, Tom Colman, access to grapes to make a cuvée of their own. True to Partida Creus form, it took an acronym: E.T. — Emilie, Tom. The wine caused a stir in the natural wine world, and Emilie never looked back.
She spent two years at Partida Creus — 2017 and 2018 — touching everything from vineyard to cellar, forming a friendship with Massimo and Antonella Gerosa that would become almost familial. In 2019 she knew she was ready. To fund her own project she spent two months before harvest working as a sommelier at Villa Más, an iconic local restaurant with a 2,000-bin cellar, tasting the full spectrum of natural, organic and conventional wine and clarifying her intention: to make wines of precision and stability without additions — direct, complete wines that tasted whole and could protect themselves.
In 2020 she bought a house in Bonastre with a small garage beneath it, built her cellar in the basement, and made her first vintage under her own name: roughly 3,000 litres. By 2021 she was up to 8,000 litres, had acquired her first hectare of old Parellada vines, and was quickly outgrowing the three small tanks and five barrels that fit beneath her stairs.
The Place — Bonastre, Five Minutes from the Sea
Bonastre sits in the Baix Penedès, the low-lying coastal stretch of Catalonia's great wine region, roughly equidistant from Barcelona and Tarragona. Emilie's vines are planted at 182 metres elevation on clay and limestone soils — a combination that retains what little moisture the Mediterranean climate offers and forces roots deep into bedrock for nutrients. The sea is a five-minute drive away, and its influence moderates the heat, preserving the acidity that defines her style.
Old Vines, Wild Growth
Emilie's own hectare includes roughly 0.6 hectares of old, wild Parellada vines — gnarled, untamed plants that produce minuscule quantities of intensely flavoured fruit. She also farms Sumoll parcels, including vines over 40 years old. Tilling is kept to a minimum; vineyard work is done meticulously, and mostly by Emilie alone.
Sebastia's Fruit
Where her own vines fall short, Emilie sources from Sebastia, one of the region's most trusted organic growers. The fruit is beautifully farmed, picked at optimal ripeness, and treated with the same care as her estate grapes — a négoce practice born of necessity, executed with integrity.
Clay, Limestone, and Patience
The soils around Bonastre are poor in nutrients and rich in structure — ideal for vine stress, terrible for easy farming. The clay holds winter rain; the limestone provides drainage and mineral backbone. It is a terroir that demands attention and rewards precision.
The Basement Cellar
Emilie's winery is literally beneath her house — a garage converted into a cellar with three small tanks and five barrels. The constraints are real: she is always one vintage away from outgrowing the space. But the intimacy is also the point: every wine is made within earshot of her kitchen.
Winemaking — Precision Without Additions
Emilie's time at Partida Creus taught her many things, but the most important was this: a natural wine does not have to be unstable. Her stated goal is to make wines of precision and stability without additions — wines that are direct, complete, and self-protecting. She is not interested in funk for funk's sake; she is interested in clarity.
Harvest is always manual. The grapes arrive intact and are treated according to their nature: direct press for freshness, short maceration for texture, semi-carbonic maceration for lift, and occasionally flotation — whole clusters suspended in direct-pressed juice — for a particular kind of aromatic tension. Fermentation is always spontaneous, carried by the yeasts that live on the skins. She adds nothing: no cultured yeasts, no enzymes, no corrections, and no sulfur in most cuvées. The wines are neither fined nor filtered.
Aging happens in stainless steel for freshness and old wood for gentle oxygenation — never new oak, never heavy extraction. The result is a range that sits in a sweet spot Emilie has made her signature: feather-light but packed with flavour, digestible but never simple, alive but never volatile. She makes what she likes to drink, and she adjusts her methods until she achieves exactly that.
The Wines — Feather-Light, Packed with Flavour, Dressed by Frédéric
The range is small, seasonal, and highly sought-after — a few thousand bottles per cuvée that sell out before the next harvest. Each one carries the same signature: fresh, balanced, vibrant, and wrapped in her brother's bold abstract art.
Lia
Estate whiteA fresh, direct white from young Parellada and Xarel·lo — Emilie's calling card. Crisp apple, white flowers, and a saline flick from the nearby Mediterranean. The entry point that proves zero-addition wine can be clean as a whistle.
Xarelina
Estate white100% Xarel·lo from older parcels, first made while Emilie was still at Partida Creus and refined ever since. More textured than Lia — green almond, fennel, and a fine chalky grip that speaks of Bonastre's clay-limestone.
OLO
Estate red100% Sumoll from 40-year-old vines — Emilie's flagship. A short maceration on skins before direct press and ten months in stainless steel. Juicy red berry, wild herbs, and a mineral spine; proof that Sumoll deserves far more attention than it gets.
Latrepat
Light red100% Trepat made with carbonic maceration and a short press, then aged in fibreglass for ten months. Plum, cold smoke, and well-balanced acidity — deeper than Omnia but still fluid, best served lightly chilled with something salty and olive-studded.
Omnia
Field blendA field blend of red and white grapes, all co-fermented. Ethereal, light, Mediterranean — rosemary, thyme, and wild strawberry. Bottled unfined, unfiltered, no SO2. The wine that sits perfectly in the space between rosé and light red.
MC
Estate white100% Macabeu from 15-year-old vines — a quieter, more contemplative white than Lia or Xarelina. Soft orchard fruit, chamomile, and a gentle texture from short skin contact. A wine that rewards patience and a cool glass.
Legacy — A New Voice in an Old Region
Emilie Mutombo matters because she was not supposed to happen. The Baix Penedès has no shortage of winemakers, but it has had very few Congolese-Belgian women arriving from Brussels events management to farm old Parellada vines in their basement. Her existence in Bonastre is itself a disruption — and her wines are good enough to make the disruption permanent.
Her legacy is twofold. First, precision without dogma: she proves that natural wine can be stable, clean, and gastronomic — that zero additions do not mean zero control. The wines are alive, yes, but they are also precise, and that precision is changing the conversation about what low-intervention wine can achieve. Second, the Partida Creus lineage: she is the most visible graduate of Massimo and Antonella's school, carrying their ethos of experimentation and joy into her own distinct voice.
Through her brother's labels, her own farming, and her refusal to add anything that does not belong, Emilie has built something that travels far beyond Bonastre. The wines are poured in natural wine bars from Paris to Tokyo to Melbourne, each bottle a small argument that the future of Catalan wine might be made by a woman with Congolese roots, a Brussels accent, and a cellar under her stairs.